Workshop Phenomenology Today
Vita-Salute San Raffaele University
Faculty of Philosophy
Research Centre PERSONA
Wednesday March 30th, 2022
11:00 – 13:00 (Rome Time Zone)
Online seminar
Virtual room 8 (https://intranet.unisr.it/livecesano/)
Maksim Miroshnichenko (UNESCO Network Chair in Bioethics and International Medical Law, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University)
“The Gift of Resurrection by Machine”: Extension Vs. Incorporation in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Failure
Abstract
In my presentation, I am going to collide and entangle two approaches to technology: extension and incorporation. For the enactivism and 4EA view, the metabolically considered living systems can constitutively — and indeed immanently — include resources and processes beyond their bodies. It means that the individual system’s autonomy is defined by its ability for adaptive coupling with the environment. It is an incorporation that affords the individual to enact her sense-making through the integration of technologies, artifacts, practices and institutions into her body schema. This view emphasizes the body-as-subject, in contrast to the extended cognition thesis characterized with the tendency to objectify body and mind. To proceed, I will concentrate on the case of dialysis as the integration of biomedical technology into the body schema through pain and discomfort. This shows the intertwinement of body-as-subject and sick body-as-object involving both subjective incorporation and objective extension, affecting the patient’s personhood. Dialysis is prescribed for persons with the final stage of chronic kidney disease, that is, kidney failure. Due to the dysfunctional state of kidneys, the patient needs to rid her blood from toxins. This is accomplished with an artificial kidney — dialysis machine. Based on the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I will analyze their view of biomedical technology as a life-supporting machine, bound, trap, and eventually a non-human ‘friend’. I will assess the idea of normativity and socio-cultural embeddedness of biomedical technologies by showing how the experiences of loss of self, dependence and immobility prereflectively define patients’ spatiotemporalities and microsocial interactions.
Download the flyer here.
Scientific Direction: Vincenzo Costa, Francesca De Vecchi, Francesca Forlè.
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